Take on the Woke Entertainment Industry

Yes, Reactionary entertainment can be fun

Editorial note: Rule 10 is being delayed as I need to rewrite parts of it, and I’ve been busy on a Rule 2 project of my own. Since it has been over a month since my last post, here’s a bit more of Rule 2: Don’t just Boycott, Compete!

In the previous post I wrote a fair amount about toys, hobbies, and other leisure activities. In part this is because I am working from childhood memories. But the other part is also important: we need to loosen the grip Hollywood has on America's soul. When people rely too much on passive entertainment from centralized sources, movie, television, and sports stars become virtual friends and leaders to a very unhealthy degree.

Even a video game arcade is healthier than gaming at home for hours on end. It gets people together. Personally, I miss the abstract shapes and straightforward play of the old 8 bit games. And a robustly mounted joystick and durable fire buttons that you can smash with your fist are much more satisfying than a handheld controller that you operate with your thumbs. I, for one, think it would be cool to revive some classic games using bigger screens and better processors. Driving and fighter jet games could economically use multiple screens -- providing an experience you cannot get at home. I'd also emphasize games where people play against each other side by side, to emphasize the social aspect.

One common problem with coin op games is that they can be too expensive for beginners and too cheap for experts. One workaround would be to have the coins (or swipe cards) pay for time instead of lives. Another fix from the old machines would be to use an internal clock to seed the random number generator for each play. That way experts cannot memorize what the obstacles will do (a common trick for mastering the original PacMan game.)

But with all this said, people are still going to watch television and movies. It would be nice to have some with a modicum of American values, and to make the major studies pay dearly for trashing cherished franchises to appease the SJWs. But in this, as with other products, let's look backwards and see what other flaws in modern movies and television that we can fix.

For starters first run movies are expensive. Go back to the 1950s and movies tickets were about half the price of today adjusted for inflation. [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/08/29/cost-of-a-movie-ticket-the-year-you-were-born/39998123/] Real prices went up in the 1960s but only occasionally have they been as high as they are today. I don't know why prices went up in the 1960s, but I would note that most movies went to color during that era, and color film was significantly more expensive.

Today, one can make quality movies without any film whatsoever. Digital cameras are dirt cheap compared to the film tech of yesteryear. And directors can review the results of a take immediately, vs. waiting for film to be developed. This should reduce the number of takes required. Technically speaking, movies should be getting cheaper. (And maybe the equivalent of 1950s movies are being made cheaper. They just aren't shown in theaters; they go directly to cable channels, DVDs, and streaming services.) Also, you shouldn't need all that much makeup -- a real time waster. Actors needed caked on makeup for grainy black and white movies, otherwise their expressions would not show up. Actors also need makeup when doing stage shows in order for their expressions to be seen in the back rows. But with ultra high resolution digital photography, we see more details of the actors' faces than we would see in real life unless we were to do the Joe Biden hair sniffing thing.

So here's the question: is it possible to revive the old business model of the neighborhood theater, whose justification is to bring traffic to neighboring businesses as much as it is to sell tickets and terrible popcorn? Can you revive such a business model without vertically integrating movie production and theater ownership? Or can you legally vertically integrate if you are small enough to fly below the antitrust radar? These are questions I cannot answer.

So let's move on to content, regardless of medium. I can think of several neglected niches:

1. Halfway realistic action movies. Raiders of the Lost Ark was fun, but it ruined PG action movies in general. It set a ridiculous standard for number and absurdity of stunts that made most subsequent action movies too unrealistic to be exciting. Couple that with the MTV/Sesame Street school of quick cuts and most modern action movies have become garish light shows. The genre became dominated by Arnold Schwartzenegger and comic book superheroes because they are more realistic than action movies with real people. Arnold was a walking talking special effect, not fully human. It was possible to suspend disbelief when his characters did unbelievable things. Ditto for heroes with superpowers.

What doesn't work is having a chain smoking, hard drinking metrosexual as a one man army. Look back at the early James Bond movies: Bond was not a superhero. He lost many fights, and when he won it was often by using exotic gadgets, improvised weapons, or other forms of "cheating." His charm, wit, and sophistication were his primary attributes. He brought in real commandoes when needed. This model shifted over the years to the point where Bond became a Saturday morning serial style hero during the Pierce Brosnan years. And then there was Quantum of Solace, a nausea inducing series of quick cuts. I have no idea how it ended. I'd rather watch 90 minutes of Teletubbies than finish that one.

With this need for continuous action, Hollywood has forgotten the art of the buildup. Take Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example. The opening scene shows the origin of the One Ring, a big reveal that doesn't happen until midway through the first book. Through the first movie, the hobbits are seen sprinting across Middle Earth in an attempt to avoid any dull scenes. The resulting effect is claustrophobic; Middle Earth feels smaller than a single U.S. county. No time is wasted reciting poetry or enjoying beer and a good smoke, as in the books. It's action! Action! Action! John Milnius' Conan the Barbarian was more Tolkienesque than Jackson's trilogy.

Note that it doesn't take a huge amount of screen time to convey a sense of time and space. Westerns did this routinely for decades. There were also westerns that kept the actual action sequence time down to something realistic, relying on anticipation and drama to move the story forward. See High Noon for an example.

Finally, to see the power of an action thriller where the hero doesn't have any superpowers, check out the 1982 movie Vigilante -- a grittier, lower budget movie in the tradition of Death Wish. Vigilante features the most thrilling chase scene I have seen in any movie. The hero is just an ordinary guy, put through the ringer. He drives like a madman after the villain because he is truly mad, not because he is a professional driver. The plot up to this point is dark enough that it feels that the character could crash and that would be the end. And the camera was in the car. With a two million dollar budget, Vigilante packs more adrenaline than all the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies put together.